Working from home

Outrage As Yahoo Bans Home Working

As news spreads and tempers rise about Yahoo banning home working, long-time home workers and Co-Founders of two business ventures promoting home working, Remote Employment and iHubbub, Ken Sheridan and Paula Wynne raise their hands to Sir Richard Branson for being such a fantastic ambassador for home workers.

Sir Richard Branson responded to the BBC’s report saying that to successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision. He said that this policy has served Virgin and many other companies well over the years.

Sir Richard said: "Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.”

Figures recently released from the Office Of National Statistics show that in England and Wales the proportion of people working mainly from home increased from 9.2% in 2001 to 10.7% in 2011, further underlining the growing tend towards homeworking in the UK.

Ken and Paula’s home business community, iHubbub, agrees that these new figures show how important flexible working is to British workers. iHubbub has seen an increase in people using their talents and passions to come up with fascinating business ventures.

London saw the sixth largest increase in homeworking (4.5%), with the South East and the South West being the regions with the largest increases at 2.2% and 2.1% respectively.

Home workers have taken full advantage of the technological advancements of the last decade and removed the need to commute to a central office. This is more beneficial to workers living in rural locations as commuting distances would be longer for their urban office counterparts.

Ken said: "We run online networking sessions for our members and they are great at helping to generate ideas and staying engaged with other professional home workers and home businesses.”

BT have stats to prove that productivity (home workers are 20% more productive than their office counterparts), staff retention levels and, of course, environmental support all benefit from home working.

Ken added, that there are few commercial challenges that cannot be overcome whilst working from home, plus a few that office working fails to address.

Yahoo is taking a backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever. The massive advances in technology enable home workers to keep in touch with their office and co-workers. Regular communication with internet tools such as Skype keeps anyone connected. iHubbub work with their team of remote workers this way, some in the UK and others as far off as Spain and France. Millions of companies from start-up businesses up to corporate companies work with this way and are completely successful.

Century-old established, outdated working cultures and traditions broke down with the technology age. Adopting a modern day approach to our working lives has seen big leaps in productivity and competitiveness.

Since the recession hit in 2008 increasingly people have been able to work from home as organisations cut down their overheads on office space and use remote locations as the new-age workplace.